The Global Economic Cost of Terrorism Is Now at Its Highest Since 9/11

The world is paying the highest price for terrorism since the 2001 attack on New York’s Twin Towers. In 2014, acts of terror cost the world $52.9 billion compared with $51.51 billion in the aftermath of Sept 11, says Bloomberg business on its web site and the latest annual Global Terrorism Index by the Institute for Economics and Peace, which has been collecting data since 1997. This year’s record terrorism death puts the cost to the globe at nearly $53 billion, more than the economic impact from the September 11 attacks.

To put a price on terrorism, IEP calculates the value of property damage, say from a suicide bombing in a building, and the cost of death and injury, including medical care costs and lost earnings. It doesn’t take into account the increased number of security guards, higher insurance premiums, or city gridlock in the aftermath of an assault.

The same statistic below shows the total costs of terrorism worldwide from 2000 to 2014. In 2007, the total costs from terrorism amounted to 20.44 billion U.S. dollars. This statistics is available on “Statista” based in Hamburg Germany which is statistics companies on the internet.

Islamic State — which this year claimed responsibility for attacks on Paris and Beirut as well as the downing of the Russian plane in Egypt — has now overtaken the Taliban in Afghanistan to be the deadliest terrorist group, killing more than 20,000 people last year, the study showed. Terrorist groups are deadlier than ever, killing 80 percent more people in 2014 than a year earlier.

The self-proclaimed caliphate, which spun out of al-Qaeda in Iraq, relies on an increasing number of foreign fighters coming from the developed world. Among non-majority Muslim countries, Russia has the highest number of nationals who have traveled to Syria and Iraq to fight, followed by France.